Can Zathura’s “dual” page mode use a page offset

pdfzathura

When viewing PDFs that are setup for print, I often want to view facing page spreads. Typically PDFs are typeset such that the first page of the file/part/chapter always starts on a right page so facing page spreads are always even-odd number pairs. Unfortunately Zathura's "dual" display mode shows everything in odd-even pairs starting with 1-2.

Is there some way to setup display of facing-pages much the way most PDF readers default to in 2-up modes?

Best Answer

Yes this is possible, it's just not well documented. Or documented at all for that matter. The only reference I found was in an issue report.

Once a file is opened, you can change the first page location by running :set first-page-column 2 from the command line.
This same line can be added to the rc file at ~/.config/zathura/zathurarc to make it the default.

Note: Since zathura 0.3.5 the format for this setting has changed. It is no longer a fixed value for all page configuration but can be set independently for different numbers of columns. As a result in order to set this for a two column layout you actually need to set the second column of the setting, the above format will have no effect. The new format looks like this:

:set first-page-column 1:2

Or if you want to set layouts for 3 and 4 column views as well:

:set first-page-column 1:2:1:2

That will start three column views with the first column but use skip to the second column to start 2 and 4 page spreads.

Related Solutions

Xpdf fit to page width in fullscreen mode

Sure enough. This appears to be a bug in xpdf.

You can switch to "width" view easily by tapping w as soon as xpdf opens, but there does not seem to be a way to make it behave from the command line. The only thing I could think of would be to hack it using expect or some sort of keyboard event routing to the X window to send it that keystroke when it starts up.

Use convert to grab a specific page from a PDF file

ImageMagick is a tool for bitmap images, which most PDFs aren't. If you use it, it will rasterize the data, which is often not desirable.

Pdftk can extract one or more pages from a PDF file.

pdftk A=input.pdf cat A42 A43 output pages_42_43.pdf

If you have a LaTeX installation with PDFLaTeX, you can use pdfpages. There's a shell wrapper for pdfpages, pdfjam.

pdfjam -o pages_42_43.pdf input.pdf 42,43

Another possibility (overkill here, but useful for requirements more complex that one page) is Python with the PyPdf library.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import copy, sys
from pyPdf import PdfFileWriter, PdfFileReader
input = PdfFileReader(sys.stdin)
output = PdfFileWriter()
for i in [42, 43]:
    output.addPage(input.getPage(i))
output.write(sys.stdout)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Xpdf fit to page width in fullscreen mode

Use convert to grab a specific page from a PDF file

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